Messiah Homepage News Archive

Messiah College artist-in-residence and renown jazz saxophonist Tim Warfield was invited to perform at the Kennedy Center’s Oct. 26 awards gala honoring humorist Bill Cosby with the 12th Annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Warfield will perform with the Terell Stafford Group, featuring Bruce Barth, piano; Eric Wheeler, bass; and the legendary Mickey Roker on drums. Other guest performers include Jerry Seinfeld, Wynton Marsalis, and Rita Moreno. The program will be taped and air on PBS stations nationwide on Nov. 4.

The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival recently honored the work of several students and an alumnus from Messiah College’s Theatre Department. Jim Knipple, from the Class of 2000, will receive the festival’s Certificate of Merit for his direction of “Fertile Ground,” in recognition of the play’s exceptional elements of production. “Fertile Ground: Stories from Messiah’s First 100 Years,” is an original blackbox production written by alumna Deborah Harbin DeGeorge ’03, to commemorate the College’s Centennial year. The play was performed on campus to sold-out audiences on Oct. 8-16.

Current students Sarah Burgess, Kimberley Lambertson, Ashley James, and Gabriella Saramago are also nominated through the festival for the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship. The main focus of this nomination and subsequent competition is to celebrate the nation’s finest student actors and the craft that enables them to create compelling and truthful characterizations. These students will compete at the regional level in January 2010. Lambertson and Saramago were nominated for their roles in “The Spitfire Grill” under the direction of Edward Cohn and Elaine Henderson. Burgess and James were nominated for their roles in “Fertile Ground.”

Messiah professors Douglas and Rhonda Jacobsen have been recognized with the prestigious Lilly Fellows Program Book Award for their book, “The American University in a Postsecular Age.” According to award’s criteria, “The biennial Lilly Fellows Program Book Award honors an original and imaginative work from any academic discipline that best exemplifies the central ideas and principles animating the Lilly Fellows Program. These include faith and learning in the Christian intellectual tradition, the vocation of teaching and scholarship, and the history, theory or practice of the university as the site of religious inquiry and culture.”

Douglas Jacobsen, professor of church history and theology, and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, professor of psychology, were confirmed as the winners of the 2009 award during the first week in October. Their book, “The American University in a Postsecular Age” (Oxford University Press, 2008), offers a “groundbreaking set of essays” that explore the implications of religion as a “pervasive and creative force” in American higher education and its influence on teaching and research in the broader academy. The Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, based at Valparaiso University in northwest Indiana, seeks to “strengthen the quality and shape the character of church-related institutions of higher learning for the 21st century.”

The Mendelssohn Piano Trio, an ensemble-in-residence at Messiah College, recently signed a five-year contract with Centaur Records to record a complete cycle of piano trios by Haydn. A significant and prestigious recording project, the Mendelssohn Trio will become only the second trio in the U.S. to have recorded such a work in its entirety.

The Collaboratory’s Mali Water and Disabilities Study team, in partnership with World Vision Mali and the West Africa Water Initiative (WAWI), recently concluded their three-year assessment of the access and use of water and sanitation facilities by disabled and elderly persons. Dean Ray Norman just returned from Mali, where he gave the final presentation for this study in Bamako (the capital of Mali) to representatives for World Vision Mali, Ghana, Niger, Ethiopia, Zambia, and the U.S. The study’s team developed simple, low-cost alternatives to improve access to wells and latrines in Mali and provided recommendations to World Vision Mali and WAWI to ensure that their facilities will be accessible to all. This study was funded by a three-year, $150,000 grant from the Conrad Hilton Foundation.

Messiah launched a new minor this semester in gender studies, focusing on how gender influences everyday life. Offered in partnership with the Department of Human Development and Family Science and the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice, the minor focuses on both women and men and the personal and social dynamics between the genders. The theories, concepts, and skills developed through this program help students better understand gender relations in domestic, religious, workplace, and political settings. Students pursuing this minor are also encouraged to pursue active learning through internships or the Philadelphia Campus.